Paul Signac

Paul Signac – The architect student taught himself to paint

Paul Signac was born in Paris on 11 November 1863. He put his early enthusiasm for art to the side in order to follow his family’s wishes and study architecture. Although drawing fascinated the young Signac, but he did not wish to practice it in a crowded architectural office but rather outside on the banks of the Seine – and water would continue to exert a great attraction on the artist later on. Signac thus terminated his studies at the age of 18 in order to dedicate himself completely to painting. He visited museums and galleries, and diligently studied the works of the great masters. Édouard Manet, Claude Monet and the Impressionists were amongst his most significant role models and points of reference in his early years, but Signac soon decided against their ideal of spontaneity, and instead opted for a structured and composed way of painting in the classical style as advocated by Eugène Delacroix. His noteworthy early works include the 1883 painting The Road of Gennevilliers.

Immeasurable dots of light and bright colours

Paul Signac was completely self-taught as an artist and had no academic training. His contact with Impressionism was thanks to his friend, the painter Armand Guillaumin, but the deciding incident on his way to becoming a world-famous artist was his meeting with Georges Seurat, the leading Neo-Impressionist painter. Together they developed the style of Pointillism using the latest finding in colour theory to create their pictures from countless dots of pure colour pigment. The big difference to the Impressionists was that Signac and Seurat refrained from mixing the necessary colours on the palette – instead, it was the eye of the beholder that blended the countess tiny dots into the intended hues. In this way, the original power of each colour was preserved and not lost through mixing. Paul Signac and Georges found in Camille Pissarro a powerful and influential patron. 

Much awarded head of Neo-Impressionism

Paul Signac painted numerous landscapes in light and bright colours and showed a particular enthusiasm for maritime scenes, with harbours and sailing boats some of his favoured motifs. Politically, he was committed to the philosophy of archaism; he became friends with Jean Grave and published in his anarchist journal Les Temps nouveaux, as well as in Le Père Peinard by Émile Pouget. Signac also put down his artistic convictions in writing. After the death of his friend Seurat, Signac became the leading representative of the Neo-Impressionist movement. He was aided by the critic Félix Fénéon, who coined the term Neo-Impressionism, and the natural scientist Charles Henry, for whose publications on the nature of colour Signac drew up the diagrams. Pual Signac received prizes and awards for his art, and was made a Knight of the French Legion of Honour in 1911. 

Paul Signac died in in his hometown and place of birth, Paris, on 15 August 1935.